Sociology after the mobilities turn

Ref lecting back on a little over a decade of research that has gathered under the banner of the “new mobilities paradigm” and “critical mobilities research,” it is a good time to ask what impact it has had on traditional disciplines such as sociology. Although sociologist John Urry’s work has been fundamental to challenging the “sedentarism” of sociological thought, sociology itself has been especially resistant to the “mobilities turn” as compared to other disciplines such as geography, transport studies and communication (though even in these disciplines the inroads are only partial). Following his book Sociology Beyond Societies (2000), Urry’s 2001 article “Mobile Sociology” in the British Journal of Sociology was re-printed in their special 60th anniversary edition (Urry 2010) as being one of the most agenda-setting articles of the decade. Yet there is scant evidence of that impact within the discipline of sociology itself: much of the impact has been on adjacent fields.